A Town of War Widows

On the fifth anniversary of the war, two Fort Hood widows share their thoughts. To read their special blogs, and their answers to your questions, click here.

On the fifth anniversary of the war, two Fort Hood widows share their thoughts. To read their special blogs, and their answers to your questions, click here.

It's a warm Friday night in Killeen, Texas, and the widows are out to dinner. They sit around a long table in the back room at Pignetti's--where the authentic Italian fare is supplemented with dishes such as chicken tenders deep-fried in a Cap'n Crunch crust--drinking wine and trying to talk about anything but their husbands, all of whom have been killed during Operation Iraqi Freedom in the past five years.

They talk about whether they are ready to date yet, and how they'll meet guys on the Internet.

"How am I supposed to refer to myself on the singles sites?" one asks. "Single mom with dead husband?"

One widow, in her early thirties with two young kids, says she's already met someone after two years alone--another soldier, stationed in Iraq--and claims her faith has allowed her to skip steps in grieving that others couldn't. They all give her a "yeah, right" look, more disbelief than jealousy, because they think it sounds too soon.

They talk about how to take off those extra 10 pounds of widow weight they've put on. They talk about getting cosmetic surgery or straightening their teeth, the only indulgences they'll consider with the money they got from the government--the standard $100,000 "death gratuity" and the soldier-elected $400,000 GI life insurance--which otherwise is invested for their children's futures. They have other widow friends who have already blown much of the money on everything from expensive memorials (a custom pool table with the deceased soldier's face in the felt) to ill-considered loans to pals. But these women work hard to keep each other from going off that deep end.

They talk about how they have coped.

"Who helped me the most through the first year?" one begins. "Jose. That's Jose Cuervo. I didn't talk to anybody."

Until, of course, she found "the group," a small but growing community of widows and Army wives who have turned this sun-blasted patch of central Texas into the nation's support center for the care of military widows and families.

I have traveled to Killeen to meet these women in advance of the fifth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom, because they offer a unique perspective on the war and its costs--a powerful reminder that amid the political wrangling over Iraq, we have publicly honored the fallen but too often looked away from the devastation to soldiers' families, especially their grieving wives and children.

While there are Iraq war widows all over the nation, Killeen has an unusual claim to fame. This military town two hours south of Dallas has seen more of its Army wives widowed than any other municipality in the country.

It makes grim sense, since Killeen is the home of Fort Hood, the nation's largest Army base, with more than 50,000 troops. During the past five years, since the start of the Iraq war and while anti-Taliban fighting continued in Afghanistan, Fort Hood has lost 426 soldiers and counting--that's nearly 10 percent of America's 4,404 deaths since the war began--leaving behind approximately 200 widows. (Nationwide, at least 2,018 women and 29 men have lost spouses to the fighting.) There are housing developments in Killeen with two or three war widows on the same block. At a new bakery in town, Gordon's Sweet Imagination, opened by an Iraq widow with her husband's death benefit, the front room is filled with the aroma of fresh cinnamon cake and decorated with a large photo of the 23-year-old soldier in camouflage gear and helmet, his warm eyes visible behind a pair of yellow-lensed sunglasses.

Despite the rising death toll, it took a long time for the U.S. military to wake up to the difficulties facing its burgeoning widow population: their isolation, their mourning, their financial hardships. So a small, bold group of women here took matters into their own hands and created the nation's only major support center for Gold Star wives and families. (Since WWI, military families who've lost a loved one have placed a gold star in the windows of their homes.) Within its tan brick walls, Fort Hood's Gold Star Center offers an ongoing lesson in how women help one another through grief.

"There's a connection between Army widows that's indescribable," says 22-year-old Stacey Markham, whose husband, Jonathan, her Texas high school sweetheart, died in Iraq last May, just as she was graduating from college and their son was approaching his first birthday. "There's a connection between all Army wives, but it's different. With the young wives, well, a lot of things happen when the husband's not home, [but] you know the intensity is kind of temporary. With the Army widows, it's permanent. You're locked in that time together, and you're more than friends forever. You're family."

"Y'know, people in civilian life don't deal with death very well to begin with," says Debbie Busch, the animated fortysomething Fort Hood Army wife who started the support center. "And when you lose a husband in combat, it's even worse because you're reminded of the war every day in the news. That's why I'm so amazed by these women. They are strong, they overcome. They go through their dark days. But the way they interact is just amazing. Grief is something that affects the mind, the body and the soul. You have to just go through it. They may try to run from the pain. Usually they catch themselves. Sometimes they have to catch each other."

On Battalion Avenue across from the Fourth Infantry Division headquarters sits a nondescript one-story shoebox of a building with a sign reading Gold Star family support center. I'm here to meet a few of the Fort Hood widows. Some of the women attend the biweekly support group meetings; others use the day care center so they can buy themselves a precious hour of private time. And many rely on the organization for its phone outreach: Someone from the center calls widows on the occasions when they are most likely to be emotional wrecks--anniversaries, birthdays, the days when their husbands' fellow soldiers return safely.

We sit in the room where the support group meets. It has a kitchen stocked with snack food, and a comfy "conversation pit," with plentiful tissue boxes placed around. When the women tell their stories, tears come quickly. I apologize for making them cry, but they wave me off. "It's therapeutic," they say, but they're also relieved to have someone willing to listen to a story they could tell 20 times a day if the people in their lives could handle it. Grief lasts so much longer than most people's sympathy and patience.

Charlotte Spencer, a lanky, gregarious 22-year-old, has just recently discovered the center, after a very lonely eight months of mourning, and this is her first visit--in fact, it's one of the first times she has ever talked out loud about her experience. In early February 2007 Charlotte--then an Army private and Fort Hood supply clerk raising a six-year-old son--was standing at a counter in Killeen's 24-hour Wal-Mart. She was looking through prints of photos sent home from Iraq by her husband, Clarence, a strapping 24-year-old former Fort Worth high school football star who'd earned a Purple Heart with the Marines during his first tour in Iraq and was away with the Army on his fourth tour. Then her cell phone rang. It was her neighbor, who said, "You gotta come home. Now. There are people at your door."

"What kind of people?" Charlotte asked.

"Army people," the neighbor said. "A chaplain."

Suddenly Charlotte couldn't breathe. "Everything around me just seemed like it stopped," she recalls. When she arrived home, two soldiers in green Class A uniforms sat in their car and waited until she got into her apartment before making their approach to ring the bell and deliver the dreaded words: "On behalf of the U.S. Army and the President of the United States, we regret to inform you...."

"I just lost it," Charlotte recalls, "I started to cry and went and hid behind the couch. I just cried, cried, cried: 'What did I do wrong? What did I do to deserve this?'"

Like most military widows, Charlotte is forever haunted by the memory of that death notification. (A fellow Fort Hood widow swears she will never again answer her front door, and is building a new house without a doorbell or knocker.) As a military wife and a soldier herself, Charlotte was always aware of that risk. But she was unprepared for everything that came next. She had disputes with her mother-in-law over Clarence's personal belongings--"She didn't want me to have anything," Charlotte recalls--and her friends started acting like she was a lottery winner, asking her to loan them cash, cosign loans, buy them cars. When she refused, saying the money was for her and her son to live on, they told her, "You've changed, girl."

All the while she was crying herself to sleep every night, even though, in her dreams, Clarence would tell her not to. "He says, 'Just don't cry no more, everything will be OK,'" she recalls. "Then I give him a hug and I wake up. I try to hurry and go back to sleep, but the dream isn't there anymore."

Charlotte felt dreadfully alone in her grief. And then, just six months after her husband's death, she was informed that she'd been grieving long enough. Many Iraq war widows complain about the emotional impatience of friends and relatives--some even report being told it was time to "snap out of it" by clergy members. In Charlotte's case it was a superior who said that her battalion was going to be deployed to Iraq soon, and he wanted her to ship out with them.

"When I joined the military I knew we were a country at war, and I know that's part of my job," she says. "But when you don't let me pay respects to my husband, who sacrificed his life for this country, that's a whole other issue. [The superior] said they needed me. I was like, 'Really? You think six months is enough time to get over a husband?'"

She reluctantly took a hardship discharge from the military, saying goodbye to a job and friends she loved. Today, nearly a full year after Clarence's death, she's only beginning to comprehend what has happened to her--a delayed reaction that's common among widows. "I'm just now getting to the point where I feel comfortable talking about it," she says.

Having seen what the Gold Star Center offers--especially its cheerfully painted day care room where her son, JaMarco, can play while she pours her heart out in the support group--Charlotte knows she'll be back.

"Sometimes it's the only light at the end of the tunnel," says Fort Hood widow Ursula Pirtle, 37, who lost her gunner husband, Heath, in 2003. "And it happened because one Army wife, with so much empathy, realized we needed to come together."

It all started with a single phone call in 2003, the first year of the Iraq war, between two fortysomething women who don't appear to have much in common. Linnie Blankenbecler is a small, striking woman with long red fingernails, dark hair spiked with pink highlights, a predilection for eating dessert before her main dish and a slogan painted over the archway of her kitchen that reads Sit long...laugh often...love much. Debbie Busch is a tall, bright-eyed, fast-talking Army wife and mom, an energetic multitasker with a husband ("the Sergeant Major") in Afghanistan and a grown son deployed in Iraq. Debbie disarmingly refers to herself as being "flustrated" by things, describes anything even slightly positive as "awesome" and sometimes jokes about the lifelong lessons of Lamaze--"it's always a good idea just to breathe, ladies, breathe."

After Linnie's husband, Jim, a command sergeant major--the victim of a roadside bombing in Samarra on October 1, 2003--became the highest ranking enlisted soldier to be killed in Iraq, Debbie joined a group of wives who took turns bringing food to the house. Debbie periodically checked in with Linnie, who otherwise was "dealing with the heartache alone," she recalls. "I didn't answer the phone or the door. I didn't know how to handle anything. I felt like I was slapped down every single day by something."

After several months something Linnie said stunned Debbie.

"How come you're the only one who still calls?"

The question was all but rhetorical to Linnie; widows ask it all the time. But Debbie took it very seriously, as she did every other aspect of being an Army wife. She understood the problem: When a husband dies while on active duty, the Army pays a death benefit, but the widow quickly finds herself cut off from military life. Army wives tend to have an active social world, organized by the Family Readiness Group (FRG) and usually run by the commanders' wives. When the men go to combat, the FRG has traditionally been their main support system, and the only source of information--besides CNN--of what is going on in the field. But that support system usually vanishes when their husbands die. Often the wives whose deployed husbands are alive can't handle being around the widows.

"When a soldier is killed, the rest of the wives think it's a disease they're going to catch," laments one Fort Hood widow. "It's like your bad luck is going to rub off on them."

Even though the war was less than a year old when Linnie and Debbie met, it soon became clear that this conflict would have more and different kinds of widows than in the past. The nation hadn't engaged in a protracted war since Vietnam, which was fought largely by young draftees; less than a third of the men who died there were married. Since then, to attract volunteers, the military has become more family-friendly. As a result, about 50 percent of the men sent off to Iraq and Afghanistan were married.

Five months after her husband died, Linnie got a call from the Post Exchange, the on-base store--her 14-year-old daughter, Jessica, who'd been having a hard time dealing with her father's death, was caught shoplifting $14.66 worth of cosmetics. It was an obvious cry for help--very common among teenagers in Killeen, where the guidance counselors at the local high schools could barely keep up with the emotional upheavals and almost daily freak-outs among students whose parents were deployed. Jessica had enough cash in her back pocket to pay for the cosmetics, but had gotten the idea into her head that the military had taken something from her, so she should take something back.

The manager at the store that day was a 39-year-old Army wife named Inge Colton, whose husband was in Iraq. Linnie told Inge why her daughter was acting out, and begged her not to take away Jessica's base ID card. Inge was torn, but ultimately confiscated the card. After Jessica wrote a heartfelt letter of apology, the Fort Hood commander in charge restored her on-base privileges.

Just a month later, Inge's 32-year-old husband, Shane, an Apache helicopter pilot, called her three times from Iraq. For the first time in their many conversations, he sounded bad--depressed, homesick, haunted, telling her over and over how much he loved her. His behavior was so unusual that she asked him if he'd been captured and couldn't reveal that he was a POW; he wasn't, and he assured her he was fine. The next thing she heard, his helicopter had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile while on a rescue mission near Baghdad.

Ironically, the only other Iraq war widow Inge knew was Linnie, who invited her to the fledgling support group Debbie had started putting together after observing that neither the military nor local houses of worship were adequately addressing the problems of widowed families. The group began meeting on base at the Comanche Chapel on Tank Destroyer Boulevard, led by Karen Duerr, a retired command sergeant major and a widow herself who was working as a counselor at Fort Hood. Sometimes the meetings were just Linnie and Inge sitting there crying in each other's arms. Both women look back on that period as a time they were quietly drowning their sorrows, Linnie with tequila, Inge with Red Bull laced with vodka.

By the end of 2004, nearly 1,500 Americans had died in the war--156 from Fort Hood--and the problems facing war widows were becoming more obvious to Debbie Busch and her tiny support group. One of the most glaring issues was money. Widows were getting about $12,000 as an instant "death gratuity" to help with initial bills and the end of a soldier's pay, and if their husbands had signed up for government life insurance (which most did), the beneficiary got a maximum payout of $250,000. But the main issue was what the women and their kids were supposed to live on, what was going to replace their husband's pay for the next 30 or 40 years.

There were supposed to be monthly retirement payments for wives and dependent children, as well as a monthly annuity paid by the Department of Veterans Affairs. However, because of a 1972 law, instead of paying both benefits, the government actually deducted one from the other, even though the fallen soldier had earned both. Also, if a widow got a job and made more than about $1,000 a month, her Social Security payments--which could average about $2,000 monthly--were cut back.

"The biggest thing about the benefits is that there's a catch to everything," says one Fort Hood widow. "For my husband's 18 years in service, I would get $8 a month for his retirement, which is a disgrace. Don't tell me he was a hero and then give me an $8 check!"

Besides the monetary benefits, the widows and families were lacking sufficient psychological support. There was no automatic grief counseling. True, each widow was supposed to have a casualty assistance officer, or CAO, who was assigned to help her through the crisis and all the military red tape. But because the war was lasting longer than expected, and was bloodier than predicted, there were not enough CAOs to do their job. (Just as there weren't enough buglers for military funerals, so a digital device was created that could be put into the horn of a bugle and allow a nonmusician to simulate playing.)

The problem of CAO training was forcefully driven home to the Fort Hood widows in late 2004 by the unhappy experience of one of their newest members, Ellen Thornton, a 34-year-old from Alabama with long curly hair, round cheeks and cried-out eyes. Ellen and her husband, Staff Sergeant Robert Thornton Jr., a tank commander, had two young children by the time he was deployed to Iraq in spring 2004. That summer the couple, big NASCAR fans, arranged to have their first-ever live Internet chat; Ellen gave her husband a play-by-play of how their favorite driver, Tony Stewart, was doing in the GFS Marketplace 400 at Michigan International. The next day at 5:30 in the evening, the doorbell rang, and two guys stood there in their Class A suits to tell her that Robby had been killed in Baghdad that morning when his tank was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.

"You have the wrong house," she told them. "I want you to go back to Fort Hood and go inform somebody else. My husband is fine. I just got an e-mail from him."

Ellen turned and saw that her six-year-old son was standing behind her crying. She tried to reassure him everything would be OK, but he pushed her away.

"It won't be OK," he said, "because my dad is dead now."

Ellen was initially assigned a CAO whom she liked. In fact, he had known her husband--and he made her transition and all the heartbreaking funeral decisions somehow bearable. ("My husband said he wanted to be cremated, and he wanted me to take him in a Ziploc bag and carry him around in my purse," Ellen recalls. "I have a heart pendant with some of his ashes; it's an upgrade from the Ziploc.") But three weeks into the process, she was informed that the soldier serving as her CAO was being reassigned to duty in Iraq--even though a CAO normally remains attached to a widow until she decides she no longer needs help, even if the assignment takes months. Not only was Ellen angry about losing her CAO, but she disliked his replacement; she says that he was rude and unhelpful and often didn't return her phone calls. (The Army says that because Ellen did not file a formal complaint, it could not comment on her situation.)

In February 2005 a U.S. Senate committee held a hearing on the myriad problems with military survivor benefits; one senator asked if America was living up to Abraham Lincoln's pronouncement to care for the widows and orphans of soldiers who gave "the last full measure of devotion" to the country. Widows were represented by the major national military family advocacy groups: Gold Star Wives of America, the National Military Family Association and the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors. But despite some press attention to the issue, nothing changed.

And then the President got an earful from the Fort Hood widows.

On April 12, 2005, President Bush visited Fort Hood and spoke to some 25,000 troops there--many of whom had recently returned from Iraq. After the speech and a lunch of fried chicken and macaroni and cheese, he spent three hours meeting privately with 33 Gold Star families. These encounters were emotional and messy, but Bush appeared to expect this--he made it clear that he didn't want the women to stand on ceremony, he wanted them to be honest with him.

And they were.

When Linnie met the President, she laid out for him the outrage of her monthly benefits, down to the last dollar. "How are we supposed to live on less than $20,000 a year?" she said. Inge, too, questioned the President about survivor benefits. But she also made it clear to Newsweek, which reported on the meeting, that she supported the President's war effort. "To oppose something my husband lost his life for," she said, "would be a betrayal."

Ellen was crying before she even said a word. The President "took one look at me," she recalls, "and he kissed both of my cheeks and said, 'I am so sorry. Tell me about your husband.' So I did." Then she related her difficulties with her CAO--which had continued to that very day, she claimed, when the man tried to accompany her in order to meet the President. Bush said, "This is unacceptable," meaning the families' concerns, "and I will be personally looking into this."

Bush also had a short conversation with Debbie. "He was very intense," she recalls. "He said, 'We have some issues here,' and I said, 'Yes, sir, we do.' He said, 'We're going to fix them,' and I said, 'I hope so, sir.'"

Over the next few days, many of the families received follow-up calls from the White House. ("Four different colonels called me," Ellen recalls.) But the politically charged press coverage of the event was a mixed blessing. While it brought attention to the Gold Star wives' issues, some people in fervently patriotic Killeen were uncomfortable with any public criticism of the military. They actually accused the grieving Fort Hood widows of being...liberals.

Debbie Busch was "flustrated," to say the least. "You cannot find a more conservative woman than me," she says. "Since when is there anything liberal or conservative about helping military families? It's not political. It's an American issue."

Within a month there was actually some progress on the financial front--Congress finally agreed on a long-lobbied-for military spending bill that increased the "death gratuity" from $12,420 to $100,000 and raised the maximum benefit on the optional GI life insurance plan from $250,000 to $400,000; the President signed it in early May 2005. But the bill didn't address the problems with the monthly payments to Gold Star families--it just paid the widows a little more money to go away. And nowhere did the law mention helping the widows and families with their psychological trauma.

While this was going on, Debbie Busch and her widows group--now somewhat larger after the publicity from the presidential visit--were talking to top brass about improving things at Fort Hood. Debbie and Karen Duerr, the counselor, were put on a team to help overhaul the training of Casualty Assistance Officers, who had been getting about four hours of instruction before handling their first death.

Today CAOs at Fort Hood get 40 hours of training, which includes listening to the widows. The women make presentations explaining why it's important that their phone calls be returned, why they may need help 24/7; Ellen Thornton, who had such a dissatisfying experience, has frequently retold the highs and lows of her interactions with the CAOs.

Now the Fort Hood CAO training is considered the gold standard for such programs, so much so that military bases across the country send representatives to visit Killeen. "The widows were instrumental in improving the training," says retired Colonel Bob Ortiz, the Fort Hood senior staff member working with the Gold Star Center at the time. "They made it real."

The Gold Star Center itself is funded not by the Army but by charitable donations through its nonprofit organization, HUGSS (Helping Unite Gold Star Survivors). Many of the staffers have husbands deployed overseas; the stories they hear from the widows can take a toll. "I don't dwell on the fact that something could happen to [my family]," says Debbie. "It would make me crazy, and you can't live life that way. But certain [women], the way they speak about their husbands...it just pierces your heart. Seeing people grieve over the loss of loved ones, hearing them say they coulda, shoulda, woulda and talk about what they miss...well, you'd be a fool if that didn't affect you and make you appreciate what you have."

Every Fort Hood death resonates through Killeen. But the one that had perhaps the most impact nationwide came in May 2006: Captain Alex Funkhouser Jr., a 35-year-old company commander from Katy, Texas, was killed in Baghdad when a bomb went off as he was escorting a CBS TV news crew doing a Memorial Day feature. The blast also killed a CBS cameraman, a soundman and their Iraqi translator, and seriously injured CBS reporter Kimberly Dozier, as well as several soldiers. The incident got enormous press coverage, which only made things more difficult for Funkhouser's then 28-year-old wife, Jennifer--his college sweetheart from Texas State--and their two young daughters, Kaitlyn and Allison, ages four and two.

An outgoing woman with long dark hair and a smile that used to come a lot more easily, Jennifer is very open about the pressures of widowhood on a young mother. "It's hard to be a mom, hard to take care of my girls," she admits. "They just whisper to each other, 'Mommy is sad.' The little one will come up and hold her hands on both sides of my cheeks and say, 'It's OK to be sad about Daddy.' And then she'll just walk off."

The hardest thing is to come home to an empty house. "The quietness is very loud," she says. "The shower is always a good place to cry."

To cope, she sought out the Gold Star Center as well as two Yahoo! groups for military widows. She was especially drawn to the one for younger women--Military Surviving Spouses--where she says the members feel a little freer to share "our feelings and frustrations. We've talked about sex (or lack of it) and wanting to move on, but not feeling ready."

Jennifer admits she's hooked on that Yahoo! group--how she became close to another Fort Hood widow--but feels it's the healthiest thing she's leaned on since Alex's death. "I remember sitting there for hours the first time I logged on and crying the whole time," she says. "At first I had to leave the site because I couldn't come to terms with the fact that now I was one of those women on there.

"It took me a long time to realize that Alex really wasn't coming back," she continues. "At times I actually forgot. I could close my eyes and remember him bringing me coffee in bed on the weekends or remember the feel of his chest hair. Then I'd open my eyes and see his flag folded on my mantle and have flashes of him lying in his coffin, and I'd break down all over again. I just didn't understand how he could be gone when I could still picture how he curved his toes on his long feet as he rocked himself in his recliner.

"I didn't take any medication to get over everything that I was feeling, but I was self-medicating. I've always loved wine and would drink a glass as I cooked dinner, but I slowly started having an extra glass or two extra glasses, or even sometimes the entire bottle."

She felt herself pushing away her daughters more and more. "The bedtime stories stopped, the cuddling on the couch stopped," she recalls. "I'm not proud of it, but I couldn't care for my girls while feeling that broken. I noticed that they started tiptoeing around me. They were afraid to get me upset. I yelled more. I screamed. I would lose it and then shut myself in my room. That lasted a couple of months. I hated myself. I knew that something had to change.

"So I went back to the group and just 'listened.' I listened to every post, every cry from another wife, every scream at the bastard who detonated the bomb that killed their husband, all of it. I started becoming addicted to the site. I needed to know that I was not alone, that I wasn't crazy. Other people had turned to drinking or pills or men to try to forget their pain. Little by little, I started talking.

"After a while I was one of the ones who would welcome a newcomer to the site," Jennifer says. "That was when I turned a corner in my own recovery. That's when I felt that maybe someday I'd be OK. Not now, but someday."

Two years after her husband's death, Jennifer thinks about what it would be like to fall in love again, even to remarry. But while she has one widow friend who is doing that, Jennifer, like most of the Fort Hood group, still feels as if she is in emotional limbo.

Many of the Fort Hood widows who aren't dating wish they were, but doing so can bring tremendously mixed feelings. Whether they go out with a civilian or another soldier--one woman is considering dating her late husband's friend--the memories of their dead spouses linger. One widow, after four years, still keeps her husband's voice on the family answering machine.

"I don't know if I'll ever be with anyone else again," Jennifer says. "Nobody would want someone with all this baggage, and I'm not sure anyone could reach the standard set by my husband and fill the combat boots he left behind. I've gone on some dates, but they didn't work. One just wasn't the type of person I wanted, the other seemed like it could have worked out, except he got scared when he knew that I was a recent widow.

"Some days I just want it so badly--I just want to be a wife again."

One late December day in Killeen, I go to the impressive new state veterans cemetery, with room for 50,000 graves. Near the entrance are granite memorial markers for Fort Hood soldiers killed in Iraq. The cemetery was dedicated in 2005; since then, Fort Hood has lost another 270 soldiers.

I watch as a crowd of more than 100 people help lay wreaths on the graves for the holidays. One woman in her early twenties kneels next to her husband's plot and simultaneously tries to keep an eye on her impossibly cute two-year-old daughter, who skips among the markers and tosses stones, still too young to understand what this place will come to mean in her life. It is almost too painful to observe, but several of the Gold Star staff manage to help this young woman and others through the day. They don't do anything but talk to them, hug them, take their hands, make sure they aren't alone with their thoughts for too long. But that is a lot.

On my last night in town, I decide to do something nice for these courageous women. I invite all the widows I have interviewed and the Gold Star staff to dinner. I imagine it will be a working meal, where I might have a chance to follow up with them on some of the difficult subjects we've been discussing. Instead, when I see them eating, drinking and enjoying themselves--chatting about diets, hair care products, Internet dating, herbal remedies, whatever--I don't have the heart to interrupt. It's too moving to see them having fun, just being attractive women dressed up for an evening out, chatting with great enthusiasm and empathy and only occasionally being reminded of what they all have in common.

After dinner three of the widows decide to go dancing at the club next door, which has live music, and invite me to tag along. We sit nursing drinks and making small talk until the band takes the stage. As they tune up, Linnie Blankenbecler, the original Fort Hood Gold Star wife for whom the support group was founded, starts talking about the first year after her husband died, before she had other widows to talk to. She says she found a lot of solace at a local club just like this one.

"I went there to dance," she says, "just so I could be held."

I nod, as if I can possibly understand.

Stephen Fried has written for Glamour on everything from neurosurgery to sex trafficking. To help the Gold Star Center and HUGSS, go to goldstarfamilysupport.org.